Stolen by Lesley Pearse Page A

couple who said they were her parents were nothing like the happy couple in her memory. They looked like them, only older, but they weren’t happy like that any longer. And where was Fleur now? No one had mentioned her.

Chapter Four
    The morning after visiting Lotte, Dale walked into the spa and found Marisa waiting for her. One look at the woman’s tight expression and she knew it wasn’t a social call.
    ‘Can I do something for you, Marisa?’ she said as pleasantly as she could. ‘I’ve got time before my first client if you want a manicure or some waxing done.’
    ‘I don’t want or need any beauty treatments,’ Marisa replied waspishly. ‘I came here to say that if you think you and Scott can run out of here whenever you feel like it, just because some girl you once worked with has lost her memory, then you are mistaken. She needs a psychiatrist, not a beautician.’
    Dale gave the older woman a scathing look. ‘I take it that when you were born you didn’t get a visit from the good fairy that doles out compassion?’
    ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Marisa asked.
    ‘Think about it,’ Dale snapped, and walked into one of the treatment rooms and shut the door. She hadn’t even thought of going to see Lotte during working hours, but it wasn’t being told she couldn’t which had made her angry, it was that Marisa hadn’t even asked how Lotte was.
    Dale knew that in the past she’d been fairly careless about people. But she was absolutely certain that she would always have been curious about how someone young and pretty ended up half drowned on a beach. And if the girl had been a friend of people she worked with, she’d have felt involved and sympathetic.
    Yet the worst of it was that Dale was sure Marisa was looking for an excuse to sack her. She didn’t know why, but the woman had had it in for her since her first day here. She had been harsh to Rosie and Michelle too, at first, but Dale could see that that was to bring them up to the standards she expected in the spa.
    Dale knew she had always had that high standard. Marisa couldn’t fault her technique, standards of hygiene or client care, she just didn’t want her there for some reason.
    Marisa had sat in on her interview, but it was Sophia Renato and Quentin Sellers, the joint owners of the hotel, who had presumably selected her from the eighteen hopefuls. They hardly ever came into the spa, and Carlos the wine waiter said they only checked the hotel about once a week and left everything to their managers.
    Frankie thought Marisa wanted Dale out because she was confident, bright and a natural leader, and once this became apparent to Renato and Sellers, they might well find it more cost-effective to make her spa manager and get rid of Marisa.
    Dale liked the idea that they might think her capable of running the spa, but if truth were told she wouldn’t really want the job. It would be too much responsibility and very little more money. She’d rather get a little salon of her own in Brighton where the profits were all hers and she didn’t have to work such long hours. But that was in the future. She couldn’t afford to make Marisa angry enough to sack her, not yet.
    Yet she also felt compelled to help Lotte. How she didn’t know, for a sixty-mile round trip to the hospital without a car was going to be difficult. But she was determined to be involved in bringing back her friend’s memory and to get her back on her feet, whatever Marisa thought about it.
    Scott had said he was going to ask Michael the chef if he could borrow his car to drive over to Chichester tonight. But even if Michael agreed, they wouldn’t get there much before eight-thirty, which the hospital might say was too late for visiting. And they couldn’t keep that up nightly anyway.
    Their transport difficulties were insignificant compared with Lotte’s problems, however. Rape was bad enough to deal with, but it looked as if whatever had happened to her in this last